Nostalgia.
WoD was a cryfest from teh first day.
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I liked the garrison that was fun, the opening was really good, the enemies were dynamic and had a lot of character to it. Zones weren’t that bad, dungeons were mostly interesting, raids were alright. Yrel can kick rocks but overall not bad.
Main problems were that it was a side story instead of progression and we still had all the problem caused by MOP.
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I mainly do PVP and I found WoD to be an amazing Expac for that.
It was really easy to level up, the high rated PvP gear looked awesome and PvE Trinkets were disabled in Arena.
This took away the advantage PvE players would have by obtaining crazy trinkets and gear. So PvP ended up being the most balanced up to that point, and was more fun and competitive IMO.
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Wod was the expansion that did the most to try and negate any advantage a pve player could have. I would say they actively disadvantaged them to some degree. Because the pvp gear would also scale much higher when in pvp.
I’ll take the bait… WoD was the best expansion, at least for Horde. I’ve gone and done multiple play throughs but that first time when it went live for an orc player and fan of lore it was fantastic. The open world treasures and vignettes were amazing design and, to me, it was easily the best continent created for an expansion. I also played warrior and Gladiator Spec was the coolest thing they ever did and I miss it more than any other pruned class ability/talent.
Mostly people will lament WoD because it was missing a raid tier (Hellfire Citadel tier gear was a joke too), they think Ashran sucked (it was AMAZING), or they hated the mission table (I totally understand, this was a failed experiment). So taking in all of these things that probably sucked for Mythic raiders and no-lifers, WoD was an amazing world to get lost in for casuals like me.
That kind of just shines a light on bad quest design though. If you don’t want people to fly over and murder the leader, then maybe put the boss in a spot where you can’t do it… or disable the boss spawn until a number of mobs have been killed, or until an objective has been triggered. There are so many ways to negate this “problem”.
And let’s face it, now that the war on flight is (for the most part) over, suddenly they are less concerned with this kind of gameplay. It’s almost as if it never really was an actual issue.
To be honest, almost any argument that they ever gave against flight concerning gameplay could be applied to Stealth mechanics too, but I don’t think they ever considered getting rid of Stealth.
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The problems with WoD wasnt the quality of the content, it was the quantity of content. What little it expanded was pretty good, but once you ate through it all you had was apexis farming and that was deathly boring very quickly.
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WoD was a lot of fun even though (or, perhaps, because) they cut it short.
I also have to say that the cinematics were top notch!
(especially the one where Yrel and Durotan face off against Blackhand.)
lol. Nope.
Nah it’s hated because of the pruning.
Wod was a bizzar beast, but i dont think anyone actually is out there opining for it.
WoD was also a case of a tragedy, its been confirmed that basically 1/3rd of that entire exp got gutted, as thinks we knwo for a fact were meant to be in WoD but did not make it.
- Tier 4 garrison
- Shatrath zone and raid
- Karabor as a major city
- Cut story content including the death of adermal Taylor not just off screen.
On top of that WoD did do a lot of good things with the game, proffessions for example were quite good, PvP gearing was good because it was the scaled, which got brought back in DF. The concept of the garrions were good but were relied on to much.
WoD to some, and at least to me, was seen as one of blizzards last big Burst of creativity and actually adding things into the game. We saw mission tables, garrions, zone abilities, the ability to pick buildings and buffs for each zone, each buff gave you a pretty damn cool unique ability in that zone as well, the idea of followers and body guards All and all WoD had a lot of really cool and really good ideas that could have been built off of.
However, in typical blizzard fashion, they take good ideas, and just completely dump them to the way side if they were not smash hits. Yet ironically they kept the mission table which arguable was the worst thing they introduced.
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Eh, yes and no.
Quests where you loot nodes or kill creatures, there’s really no “good” counter-design/friction to it. Getting dismounted is annoying. Fighting inside buildings has camera issues as well as is restrictive to casters (LOS, movable space).
Boss creatures spawning after slaughtering them doesn’t work well in a shared world. If it takes too long to spawn, it’s frustrating. If it seems to always be alive and the tag is easily shared, then why bother doing “after so many kills?”
I think it’s just better that they trying to minimize “miserable” quest mechanics.
I just think it had the most memorable leveling. Everything else was bad. IMO
WoD had AMAZING leveling, and IMO was probably the best leveling experience wow ever had/did to date.
It was the perfect balance of quest hub and zone stories.
I had a lot of fun in WoD, it did feel it was lacking content but I had fun doing what they had. I really loved garrisons and the leveling experience. I also loved Ashran - getting that item, whatever it was, and running around nuking entire teams as boomkin was so much fun…
I really didn’t care for the story - burned out by time travel craziness. I was super into the WoW lore at the time and I distinctly remember a panel at Blizzcon. A Dev was explaining the story and said “Just dont think too much about it…” And as a story nerd that was a huge red flag.- at least at the time.
As a feral main I also am remembering feeling pretty weak coming from MoP where I think I remember being really strong. Its been too long so I dont remember exactly but I think I was not super happy with the class.
It’s called “trolling”.
To be fair, buildings can be designed large enough for combat. Obviously, you can’t do this for every quest boss, but it could be done for many.
Spawn issues can largely be overcome by sharding and/or activations (the boss spawns when you reach a point in the quest that asks you to burn papers or sound a horn of whatever). This means that once you reach that point in the quest chain, the boss will always be there for you.
Like I said though, suddenly (once they have decided that flight is okay) bypassing mobs is no longer the devastating issue that they once claimed. Funny how that happens.
I could never really prove this but I suspect that they really just wanted to cut costs and save development time by creating smaller zones, which they could not do effectively in a world with flight.
I just love my Garrisons.
It’s the only Player Housing there is. I wish they were customisable, I wish I could make furniture and decorations, and have the Blood Elf/ Thalassian style Architecture rather than the masculine Orc stuff, but, hey, it’s still my house. (For all my higher level characters!)
I feel this about Cata, oddly the Expac I started in. I don’t get the love for it. Yea we got Rag 2 flaming boogaloo but to me that was the best part because I didn’t play vanilla and I got a harder version of him for my first go.
But to your question, I enjoy time walking WoD because it’s the Expac I left (non game reasons) and the Garrison seems enjoyable. The zones looked pretty cool to me and there were CLEAR differences between horde asthetic and alliance asthetic, which is nice when a lot of times questing is done in similar zones now. So it existed in an era when factions had different questing experiences. So there was a reason to have a toon on each side. Thrall’s story was pretty good, and Kahdgar getting screen time was pretty new back then. At least to the extent he got it.
But, if I had to venture a guess as to why people LOOK BACK on it fondly is it was the first time Blizz caved and cut themselves short, and it was widely known. There was supposed to be more to the story, but players got fed up with the “little” it seemed we got. Not realizing we got quite a bit for both factions independent of each other and there were grand storylines for each zone. Not everyone enjoys putting a ton of time into multiple characters, so being forced to play one in each faction to fully immerse in the story probably lead to players saying things they maybe regret in hindsight. Perhaps, thinking about WoD: Remix. There’s a chance (a hope more likely) we get the original story. The third tier. The game we took away from ourselves by being upset.
But, this is just my late night rambling thoughts.
Highlight of WoD for me was getting a corehound mount…rest was meh. More so i was moments away from the legendary ring then poof they killed the quest line and threw out my progress because I took a break at one point
Its when i got my own account (played on firends accounts before)
The garrison was fun to build and customize
The quests, duggs and raids were cool (- that slow rollplay one that takes ages to start). Reminds me of one “quest” that when to get close to the group of npcs they all get nuked, leaving a bloddy boot toy
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